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Placing by Touching: An Empirical Study on the Importance of Tactile Sensing for Precise Object Placing

Luca Lach; Niklas Funk; Robert Haschke; Séverin Lemaignan; Helge Joachim Ritter; Jan Peters; Georgia Chalvatzaki
In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Pages 8964-8971, ArXiv, 2023.

Abstract

This work deals with a practical everyday prob- lem: stable object placement on flat surfaces starting from unknown initial poses. Common object-placing approaches require either complete scene specifications or extrinsic sensor measurements, e.g., cameras, that occasionally suffer from occlusions. We propose a novel approach for stable object placing that combines tactile feedback and proprioceptive sensing. We devise a neural architecture that estimates a rotation matrix, resulting in a corrective gripper movement that aligns the object with the placing surface for the subsequent object manipulation. We compare models with different sensing modalities, such as force-torque and an external motion capture system, in real-world object placing tasks with different objects. The experimental evaluation of our placing policies with a set of unseen everyday objects reveals significant generaliza- tion of our proposed pipeline, suggesting that tactile sensing plays a vital role in the intrinsic understanding of robotic dexterous object manipulation. Code, models, and supplemen- tary videos are available on https://sites.google.com/ view/placing-by-touching

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